These articles always drive me nuts, because it is an unfair analysis: they are comparing the current insecurities of today's 25-year-olds with the current secure status of today's 50+-year-olds -- not with the equally insecure status that today's 50-year-olds felt when they were 25. And frankly, they're comparing today's 25-year-olds to only some of yesterday's 25-year-olds -- specifically, the ones who largely guessed right and came out on the winning side of many prior economic upheavals. Because the folks who came out on the losing side of those changes generally weren't in a position to provide the stable, MC-or-better upbringing that tends to create kids who expect life to be secure and who take it as a given that they should do better than their parents. You know, the kind of kids who grow up to write these articles.
In short, if you are 25 and writing an article like this today, you cannot possibly know how insecure it felt like to be 25 in 1940, or 1968, or 1984. So let me give you some data points for comparision:
Early 1940s: my granny and grandad grow up in poverty on the farm. Upon graduation from HS, college is not an option; his only viable "career paths" are to do what their parents did and continue subsistence-level farming, or join the military and jump right into the hell of WWII. He chose the latter. A few years later, he was shot down and died, leaving my Granny with a toddler and pregnant with my dad. Maybe he didn't feel insecure; after all, he was dead. How do you think she felt at 22? No husband, two tiny kids, no skills (and no decent-paying jobs post-war that would hire women anyway), with only poverty-level military benefits to support the three of them.
Late 1960s: Having survived the Cuban Missile Crisis and the JFK assassination, my mom and dad graduate college into another war, MLK/RFK assassinations, massive protests, protesters being beaten and shot, and, oh yeah, riots and cities burning. They then get jobs and watch the economy move into a decade of stagflation, with no growth but double-digit interest rates; the cherry on the top was gas rationing and price gouging -- coats-on-in-the-house level of expensive.
1980s: I hit HS at the same time as the Reagan Recession. Every day, manufacturing jobs are disappearing; the way of life that most of my classmates grew up expecting -- get a HS degree, get a job in the factory, keep your head down and work hard, retire with a pension in 30 years -- suddenly seems far more risky than secure. I guess the good news is that we're not at war, if you don't count Afghanistan and Nicaragua and our government trading coke for guns to support a war Congress refused to get involved in; not to mention the constant, never-ending pissing match with the USSR. I hit the midwest for college just in time for the farm crisis (embargo on grain exported to USSR!); so much for real estate being a "safe" asset. And did I mention it's a recession and no one's hiring? So now what?
I am not saying that I, or any other generation, had it worse than today's Millennials. In fact, in the end, every single one of the prior generations did just fine. My Granny's second husband caught the post-war boom; they lived in trailer parks their whole lives but managed to raise three boys and send them all to college. The '70s were tough for my mom and dad, but then they hit the beginning of the giant economic boom that started in the '80s and had secure jobs from then on out. And, perhaps most importantly, they were in at the invention of mutual funds, got in at the beginning of that boom, and so did better financially than they ever expected. I went to law school, got lucky (even though I graduated into the huge legal recession of the early '90s, I avoided the cuts that let go 50 other young attorneys), saved money and kept my expenses reasonable and so was able to survive the first tech crash despite DH's 3 job losses and interstate moves in 5 years, and was in a position in 2008 where I didn't have to touch a damn thing and so made out just fine.
What I am saying is that none of us knew at 20 or 22 or 25 that we were going to make it ok. In fact, most of us thought we were completely screwed. The whole world looked like it was blowing up, or about to; the rules of the game had changed dramatically, and no one knew what the "new" economy was going to be, or which path would lead to success and which to failure. Sound familiar?
That's why I don't like the "who has it worse" articles. Frankly, just about anything that could happen to me in my life still puts me way ahead of my Granny. You just have to do what everyone has always had to do to succeed: work hard, look for opportunity, be flexible, and make sacrifices. Even then, there are no guarantees. But maybe, if you're lucky, in 20 years your kids can write an article about how much easier you had it.
Now get off my lawn.
